An Affair to Remember
by Roxanne Morinaka
Summary: Death fic TIVA The future is not always bright. Rated for safety.


Disclaimer; I do not own NCIS and no profit was made. (not a shock if you read it)

Note: my first attempt at an NCIS fan fiction and it is a little all over the place. Please be kind.

Warning, Death-fic, also contains the mention of sex.

**An Affair to Remember**

'_She's dead, he tells himself for the thousandth time. She died in my arms. And when I touched her next, the last time I ever touched her, it wasn't her anymore - It was something cold, cold and empty._

'_She cannot be alive._

'_But isn't that her scent, at least a hint of it, riding the winter breeze? What is it, if not her, that wakes him in the darkest hours of the morning with the taste of her sweat on his tongue; the warmth of her skin tingling his fingertips; her rustling, throaty chuckle still echoing through the halls of his lonely home?_

_No. She lived the assassin's life, and paid the price. He heard her heart flutter and fail, felt the final shudder - and there was no doubt, no hope of doubt that she was gone. Gone forever._

_But soon, the distinction between reality and nightmare evaporates. How _

_can he ignore what is happening? How can he deny it? It's her…her fingernails in the flesh of his back, her arms around him, her lips on his, wanting him, loving him, devouring him - just as it was her beating heart at the whirling center of her hellish attack.'_

_-Elektra Lives Again, Frank Miller_

The aluminous light on the bedside clock blinked at 4:00am; Tony groaned soundlessly and turned his back on Jeanne. It had been two years since Ziva died, two years and his mind, his dreams still wouldn't let him forget.

Sometimes when he walks in the office he expects to see her, her ghost overlapped with Kate's sitting at that damned desk, that cursed desk. No one sat there now. Ziva had left months before she died and still he saw her ghost frozen at that desk, frozen and staring at him all day.

Jeanne had become a doctor and he had married her. He had tried to move on from Ziva's death; and his affair, the three days he had actually been allowed to love her. Jeanne had never known, and all his guilt for his dalliance had died with Ziva. Now the guilt he felt came from living; with Jeanne or even at all. She wanted children. The idea of giving her a child made him feel…

He missed his flippancy, missed the way he could find a joke and a film in everything, but his grief was like a lead weight on his chest getting heavier everyday. Some days he felt like he was lucky just to breathe.

He could feel her stir beside him, sighing happily and wrapping her arms around his waist. Ziva was smaller, would find it harder to rest her chin on his shoulder like that.

He turned and kissed her forehead; most women taste of make-up even when their faces are clean, like the memory of it is somehow contained within their pours. Ziva tasted like soap and moisturisers, she tasted clean.

But she wasn't clean, her hands were coated in more blood than he had ever realised; even on her death bed she had taken many with her. He understood that she had been raised for it…but there is a time in your life when that stops being an excuse and she had changed when she was with NCIS, he was so sure of it…maybe is they'd had more time together…

They had been in Spain when they had seen her, seventeen naval officers had gone missing off the coast and they were walking the diplomatic minefield (never a good idea with Gibbs) to find out what had happened.

The bar had been sleezy and the patrons hostile. McGhie had been sunburnt and dressed like a Columbian drug dealer in his attempt to fit in, Gibbs had been oddly at home and he had been boiling. He had never expedited to see her.

She had tried to avoid them, but McGhie had called her name out loud and bounded over before you could say 'Undercover' and after that there was nothing to be done. She had helped them find a few leads, then somehow they were back in his hotel room and she was like a force of nature. Lamps were broken, the headboard cracked…she was reckless and desperate and overwhelming.

And then she was gone.

He had spent all day trying not to remember; trying to do his job. He never thought about Jeanne, not even once and that was more telling than anything.

That night he was bruised from a fight with a suspect that had tried to escape, he was tired and confused and had 17 missed calls from Jeanne. Just as guilt was starting to set in she arrived again. She was confused, distracted and dressed in red. She went to embrace him and then offered him a massage when she felt how tight his shoulders were.

It was spectacularly bad, clumsy, she seemed to hit every pressure point he had. But they were her hands and somehow that made it better. The second night was slower and more intimate. She seemed like she was trying to memorise every bit of him in case this was the last time. She snored beside him briefly and then left before he woke up.

He had missed her when she left; when Mossard had ordered her away. Gibbs had tried to fight it and been overruled by Jenny. They had heard nothing from her for six months until Spain.

He had cheated on Jeanne in his mind before he had even touched Ziva.

On the third night he took her against the hotel room door, in the kitchen and on the floor. She slept the whole night and left at 6:00am.

That was the last time he touched her alive. She took two bullets in the chest and one in the head. A professional job that killed her almost instantly. She had taken four of them out before the fifth managed to nail her with the first shot. They had snuck into the morgue to visit her before someone came to collect the body, he wondered who that would be when Israel had to disavow all knowledge of her actions.

Later in a Gibbs private methodical investigation of the facts they discovered that Ziva was betrayed by her partner who had excepted a Hamas contract on her life.

Still Tony believed that somehow she had known things were coming to end; the Ziva he had known would not have thrown herself at him unless she knew for certain he would never get the chance to rub it in her face.

But that would have meant she wanted to die and that didn't seem quite right either. She was too much of a fighter, to dedicated a spy.

It killed him that in the three days they never talked. That she had died keeping all of her secrets, the secrets he had promised to pry out of her, that he knew he could pry out of her with time…

He had gone home, attempted to mourn and then proposed to Jeanne.

Part of him wanted to be cruel and tell her that, tell her he had tried to use her to forget…what had happened to him?

"Honey are you ok?" Jeanne yawned kissing his shoulder.

"I'm thinking about movie night. How about 'An Affair to Remember?'"


End file.
